Start-up of the Month: Agricolus

June 2018

Agricolus: Making Precision Farming Easier

Agricolus s.r.l. is an Italian start-up working in Precision Agriculture. The company’s mission is to support farmers, agronomists, agri-food processors and other agricultural operators in optimising agronomic practices by using state-of-the-art technologies of data collection and analysis.

The Team behind Agricolus

The project was launched in 2010 thanks to the collaboration between the Research & Development (R&D) team at TeamDev, a software company based in Perugia, Italy, and Aedit s.r.l., a spin-off of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) in Pisa that works in research, development, transfer and dissemination of information technology in the agri-environmental sector.

The idea of a sustainable future, high professionalism, great experiences, and dynamism define the identity of Agricolus S. r. l., whose strength is made up of a multidisciplinary team: agronomists and developers, GIS technicians and data scientists working for modern agriculture.

Earth Observation enables a new Era of Precision Farming

The core project of the company is a cloud-based ecosystem of precision farming applications. Also named Agricolus, it is a web platform that can be accessed easily by briefly creating an account: the platform enables farmers to make targeted decisions regarding the specific needs of their individual crops. These decisions reduce costs, improve yield quality and quantity, and also minimise the environmental impacts of farming. Such decision support systems, forecast models, smart pest and disease control tools in combination with remote sensing provide completely new solutions and production procedures for farmers and technicians.

Earth observation data from Copernicus Sentinel 2 are processed in the Agricolus application and can be accessed by the user by means of the imagery feature. The Earth observation data help farmers to identify homogeneous management zones at a farm level by considering crop status regarding, for example, irrigation needs or plant protection interventions. It compares the plant vigour and water stress values for several fields. It is also possible to analyse time variation for the entire farmland or single crops.

Reducing Damage by the Olive Fruit Fly in Italy

Since 2015, ASSOPROL Umbria, an Italian association with more than 1,900 olive oil producers, has been using the Agricolus platform in order to monitor trends in olive fruit fly populations and weather conditions in order to help farmers recognise the right time to begin targeted treatments.

One of the most useful Agricolus features in this case is the forecasting model for the probability (risk) of generation and distribution of the olive fruit fly.

As one of the top 50 Copernicus Masters entrants in 2017, Agricolus gained access to the second edition of the Copernicus Accelerator and is now supported by its mentor Willem Bulthuis from WBX Consulting, who supports the delicate step of scaling-up.

Shortly after the start of the coaching, the first version of Agricolus Essential was released online, making it possible to access a basic version of the application worldwide. Find out more about the pioneering application at www.agricolus.com.

Words from the Mentor

“Precision Agriculture is a very relevant innovation nowadays, making it possible to grow quality products for the Earth’s steadily growing population while reducing the use of natural resources and pesticides. There are thus more and more start-ups emerging in the field. The Copernicus Accelerator start-up Agricolus is very well positioned, though, due to its multidisciplinary team, its strong customer focus, starting with specific crops, and a pragmatic approach to market entry and business model decisions. The founders are great to work with!”